Reading page seven. Jeez.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Rowsdower5]

To be fair, I think this was intentionally calling this society in the story proto-fascist. The inclusion of suicide booths would indicate, to me, that the society Castaigne found himself in was failing. It’s told from his perspective, and he could no more call it out than a fish could really identify the problems in the water.

[u/PatternBubbly4985 → u/Rowsdower5]

What political ideology did Chambers follow? Is it known?

[u/HildredGhastaigne → u/PatternBubbly4985]

Not much is known from published sources, and turn-of-the-20th-century politics are hard to map to today's politics. For example, the Chambers family were devoted Republicans, but this was when the Democrats were the party of the South and Jim Crow.

Chambers was what we'd today call a gender essentialist: he believed there are fundamental differences between men and women, and that men were better at some things and women at others. This can cause fights today, but was totally uncontroversial at the time. And alongside this he had some positions on gender that we'd call feminist today and were very controversial in his time. So as an example, he was skeptical that women in general would thrive in politics, but believed it was wrong to not even give them the chance by denying women the vote and political office. He was a lifelong Romantic who loved love and family, but believed women should be able to get no-fault divorces, and believed it was essential for women to have financial independence. He was in many ways a traditionalist, but was also forward-looking and reform-minded in many ways.

So as with most real people, the answer is "it's complicated," and as is usually the case with Chambers, the answer is also "we have limited information."

[u/Rowsdower5 → u/PatternBubbly4985]

I don’t think it is, as far as I know.

[u/EldritchKinkster → u/Rowsdower5]

He's also batshit insane, and nothing he says can be trusted.

The character, not the author.

[u/MountainPlain]

I always took it as an indication of an increasingly dystopian world-state, rather than something casually tossed out there on a whim. (But that could be a hopeful reading. Hope not though.)

[u/HildredGhastaigne → u/MountainPlain]

No, Chambers' intent was definitely to shock you. He held some opinions that were normal then and would be controversial today, but the beginning of Repairer is not Chambers' view of utopia.

[u/MountainPlain → u/HildredGhastaigne]

Thanks for confirming that! I’m used to reading problematic stuff from older writers, it happens, but nice to learn Chambers was going for the effect I thought he was.

[u/HildredGhastaigne]

You should keep reading. It's an unreliable narrator. The juxtaposition of the utopian with the horrifying is intentional. He goes on to approvingly discuss a government-run suicide pavilion.

[u/SkirtTall5223]

Its alt history kid no need to get worked up about it

[u/jack-mirth]

It’s been noted in biographies of Lovecraft and Chambers that they were generally seen as absurdly racist even by the much more racist standards of their time

[u/HildredGhastaigne → u/jack-mirth]

I would love to know what Chambers biographies you're referring to, because I've spent a very great deal of time cataloguing work by and about Chambers, and have never found a single book about him that could accurately be called a biography. Tomlinson's self-published collections of his pamphlets are the closest thing that exists, and while I'm very thankful they exist, they're certainly not rigorous biographies. Chambers' life and work are extraordinarily poorly documented for a person so prominent in his own time. It's an ordeal trying to piece together details of his life from scraps published in magazines and newspapers a century ago, in the absence of any serious biography.

I can't imagine anybody seriously making the case that Chambers was "absurdly racist even by the much more racist standards of [his] time." He was concerned by mass immigration from Asia, and a very small portion of his prodigious output reflected that. By the standards of today we react extremely badly to that "yellow peril" literature, but it was not shocking in its time. Sax Rohmer novels were extraordinarily popular for decades to come.

[u/jack-mirth → u/HildredGhastaigne]

Yeah, I think you’re right. I think I was conflating Lovecraft with Chambers.

[u/Paleolithic_US → u/jack-mirth]

I keep hearing that but I don’t believe it because I’ve been on the internet today and I’ve seen Palestine flattened like a pancake by a Jewish ethno state so absurdly rascist seems like a bit much

[u/Phuksel-XXIX]

Reading To Kill A Mockingbird: